Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and the Florida Scrub

About twenty miles southeast of Gainesville, on a narrow strip of land between two lakes, sits the farmstead that changed American literature's understanding of Florida.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings arrived in north Florida in nineteen twenty-eight, purchasing a seventy-two-acre orange grove near the unincorporated community of Cross Creek. She had come from the northeast, a newspaper journalist looking for something different. What she found was a rural, isolated world of Florida scrub and swamp that had barely been written about at all, populated by people living close to the land in ways that seemed to belong to an entirely different century.

She started writing about them. Her first Florida novel, South Moon Under, published in nineteen thirty-three, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Then in nineteen thirty-eight, The Yearling appeared. It is the story of a boy named Jody Baxter, his family's grinding poverty in the Florida scrub, and his love for a young deer. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year. It sold in enormous numbers, was translated into dozens of languages, and was adapted into a major Hollywood film. For many Americans and international readers, it was the first Florida they had ever imagined: not beaches and palm trees, but hammocks and sand hills and the quiet tragedy of a rural childhood.

Rawlings stayed at Cross Creek for most of the rest of her life, writing from that landscape even as her fame grew. Her memoir of the place, simply called Cross Creek, was published in nineteen forty-two. The property is now a Florida state historic site. The grove, the farmhouse, and the shed where she wrote are preserved largely as they were when she lived and worked there.